I have mentioned how I have wanted to write a parenting book for over three years now in my earlier blog.  What I haven’t revealed is that one of the main reasons I became a therapist was my own painful experiences with my parents, in particular, my mom.  Like many people I know and most of my clients, I grew up feeling unloved and uncared for.  And like most people, I had stories upon stories of being ignored and neglected emotionally to justify my feeling that she didn’t care about me.

I will not go into the details here about what changed my perspective, but when Leor, my son, was born, I had an opportunity to reexamine “my story” around my mom not loving me, and I realized that it was not at all true.  (If you wish to read the details, read my letter to my mom)  I suddenly realized that all these years I was suffering and missing my mom were based on perceiving my experiences through an immature and distorted lens of a child.

A survey of people around me at that time yielded similar stories: people reported feeling unloved or uncared for by their parents.  It occurred to me that something was seriously off here.  Most parents love their children more than life itself.  How is it that so many children grow up feeling unloved?

This truth, coupled with my own deeply loving feelings for Leor, drove me to want to understand how this could happen.  I ventured not only to discover the source of this paradox, it became one of my life’s missions to repair this misconception and return parents and children to their rightful place of love with each other.

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